Garriott and his cadre of friends learned about more than computers that summer. Like many teens growing up in the mid to late 1970s, they got sucked into the swashbuckling world of TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons. “Lord British became my character in D&D games,” he says. “We were gaming all night and learning about computers and math by day.”

I have a theory that much recent tech development and innovation over the last decade or so has an unspoken overarching agenda. It has been about creating the possibility of a world with less human interaction. This tendency is, I suspect, not a bug—it’s a feature. We might think Amazon was about making books available to us that we couldn’t find locally—and it was, and what a brilliant idea—but maybe it was also just as much about eliminating human contact. –David Byrne